A 2013 PopMech Backyard Genius Award goes to Jonathan Tippett, the brains behind the Alpha Leg and the Exo-Frame controller. (Check out the rest of the award-winning inventions here.)

When I arrive, Jonathan Tippett has just finished his lunch and is fighting his way through a badly translated user's guide to a batch of lithium iron phosphate batteries. The sun has come out after a long, drizzly late-spring morning, and he's seated at a small red folding table in the parking lot outside the eatART laboratory, in an industrial complex of warehouses and shipping containers. In the distance the North Shore Mountains still have their snowcaps. I wipe the water off a chair and sit down to join him.

We talk for a few minutes about giant spiders and snakes, but I've come a long way to watch Tippett jump up and down on one leg, so I ask if I can see him do it. He tells me that his leg isn't working right now, and that sucks, since I know it's the only one he's got. But I'm here, so he gets up and walks me into his lab to show me how impressive his limp, lifeless leg really is.

The leg is 6 feet tall, a multihinged structure of welded tubular steel, fitted with hydraulic rams, dampers, and air springs—all articulated like the hindquarters of a dog. It is permanently attached to a flatbed trailer by a 6-foot-high pivoting tower, which itself is tethered to the trailer by four heavy-duty nylon straps. Hydraulic lines extend out from the leg to a control seat on the ground next to the trailer. That seat, which Tippet calls the Exo-Frame, is built around a repurposed unicycle saddle. It has a five-point harness and an articulated metal cuff that secures to the user's forearm with an inflatable air bladder. The idea behind the machine is human amplification. A user is supposed to power up the whole thing, strap himself into the Exo-Frame, and lock into the cuff.

Tippett and his team of volunteers designed their 2860-pound leg to respond directly to the user's arm movements. It can move up and down, even jump up into the air, amplifying the force applied by the user by a factor of 100. But the leg also communicates force back to the controller; when it lands with a thud, a proportional kick is sent into the arm of the person who made it jump. And it's worth mentioning that the control seat is meant to be mounted on top of the leg, so that the user rides the machine and operates it at the same time—Tippett admits that he hasn't actually tried that yet. In fact, the machine has been operational for only about 10 hours total so far—but that's about to change.

The batteries Tippett was reading up on when I arrived are the reason the leg is currently lifeless. Tippett and his team are building them into a power pack that should make the leg reliable, rechargeable, and portable. Designing and installing that power pack is the final step in the build of the leg, which the team at eatART—the engineer–artist collective that Tippett helped found—has been working on for three years. Soon it will make the rounds of the Burning Man/Maker Faire/Ars Electronica circuit, where a creation like this could drop jaws. But for all the work that's gone into the project, Tippett sees it as just a starting point. He calls his creation the Alpha Leg, because it is essentially a prototype and testing platform for the machine he really wants to build: a giant, four-legged, human-controlled walking exoskeleton named Prosthesis.

Eric Ogden

Eric Ogden

There is a surprising number of precedents for Tippett's idea. In the 1960s a General Electric researcher by the name of Ralph Mosher pioneered a series of "man amplifier" rigs designed to grant human beings electromechanically assisted superstrength. These machines included a four-legged walking vehicle, as well as a giant claw that turned the engineers who posed for pictures with it into cyborg–nerd monsters. As awesome as the R&D program looks in hindsight, it was ultimately shuttered because the slow, complicated manual process of manipulating these machines was both mentally and physically exhausting.

But the idea gained traction in movies. Early examples include AT-ATs and AT-STs from the Star Wars series, and the Power Loader that Ripley uses to fight extraterrestrials in Aliens. More recently an AMP suit appeared in Avatar, and building-size Jaegers are fighting huge monsters in this year's Pacific Rim. These giant, wearable machines constitute their own sci-fi genre, known as mechs. The idea surfaces so routinely in cinema that it's surprising how few modern attempts have been made to create them in real life.

That's not to say people haven't tried. Japanese agricultural equipment manufacturer Sakakibara Kikai has created multiple giant mechs, one of which is intended for children. In the 1990s a Finnish company called Plustech Oy (since absorbed by John Deere) prototyped a six-legged logging tractor. Videos of these machines reveal them to be sluggish, shuffling creations. But this type of slow-motion proof of concept is not what Tippett has in mind. He wants a running, jumping, nimble machine. "The world's first sports robot," he says.

This isn't just a glib characterization. Tippett's collaborators have created an entire narrative around Prosthesis, which is part of a "robot racing league from the future." That means team logos, T-shirts, hats, even a red jumpsuit that Tippett wears whenever he's pictured with the Alpha Leg. One member of the team, a video-game software engineer named Gerald Orban, drops by from the game studio next door where he works to show me the graphical user interface he is programming for Prosthesis; it's a colorful, animated, pulsing pie chart straight out of the Iron Man movies. Part of this production is clever marketing—Tippett's team is aiming to finance the construction of Prosthesis through an $80,000 Indiegogo campaign—but it also seems that Tippett genuinely enjoys the theatrics.

In the haphazardly funded, all-volunteer, build-by-night world in which Tippett is attempting to construct both the Alpha Leg and Prosthesis, there is room for skepticism about his chances of realizing his ambitions. But there are also plenty of reasons to believe that he can: Those reasons are scattered around the eatART lab. Near the entrance is the Mondo Spider, a fully functional eight-legged walking vehicle that steers like a zero-turn tractor. Tippett built that in 2006. In the back is Titanoboa, a nightmarish 50-foot-long electromechanical snake created by Tippett's collaborator Charlie Brinson last year.

Tippett's mechanical instincts first surfaced in childhood, when he raced RC cars on a track behind his home in Oakville, Ontario. "I would tinker for hours in the basement tuning the suspension of my off-road racer," he says. He got a mechanical engineering degree from the University of British Columbia, and has worked professionally on nautical hydraulics, fuel cells, and medical implants—he currently works part-time designing stents for a medical device company.

He is at times wistful about just how much of his life he has thrown into building ever-larger and more fanciful creations. Tippett is 39 now, and he thinks it will take him two more years to build Prosthesis. I ask what he'll do when the machine is finished, and his plans are downright domestic: "I'd like to work on having a family," he says. "Find a wife and have some babies." But then his eyes brighten as he revises that future in his mind. "Although I do have another machine I'd like to build . . ." He describes a huge, catlike device that you'd ride in a prone position. As he talks, I try to imagine the ideal world of Jonathan Tippett: kissing his family goodbye as he leaves in the morning to work on giant mechs for a professional robot racing league—just another day at the office.

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